Hi, my name is Yulik. Hi, my name is Zhenia. We’ve been together for 3.5 years now. We started dating on New Year’s — so now it’s very easy to count.

How we met

We met online. I found some little chat on Twitter — lesbians and feminists had gathered there. I thought: oh, this is for me. It was right at the start of the full-scale invasion, I had nothing and no one, and I was like: okay, I urgently need to socialize. I found a lot of people there, Zhenia among them. And that worked out really well.

It’s hard for me to pin down the moment, but I think that for me Yulia is my support. She understands me in everything, supports me in everything. And conversations with her feel like solid ground under my feet. So that was the moment I understood that she is my person and that I’d want to be beside her. And also, I always make you laugh. True.

I realized Zhenia was my person as that feeling gradually built up. At first I understood that all our values lined up. I had found a person for whom every single point was perfect. I’m thinking: wow, this can’t all be so great. And basically that’s what I thought — well, that’s it, I’ve fallen in love, I’m done for. Someone like her will never look at me, someone like her will never be with me. And that’s that. And then it turned out that she absolutely would be — and that I’m great too. Great.

What family means to us

For me, family is a feeling of acceptance. It’s a place or a person that loves you, supports you. Where you can be heard, be seen. And where you know it’s a safe place. That right there — that’s family.

For me, family is loving a person and choosing them every day. Knowing that I always have a place and a person I can come to at the hardest moment. From one room to another room, for example. And complain about something. Just knowing that at my best and at my ugliest I will still be loved. I’ll still be accepted, loved, supported, and told that everyone else is terrible and I’m the good one.

I feel it every time I think about a future with Zhenia. Over time I realized that I’d want a family of my own, I’d want to have children and to have that classic picture right beside me: a table, a big family, kids running around, my beloved woman, a nice dinner on the table, and just talking about the day.

The state makes me doubt it

That feels very warm to me. I understand that it requires a great many things at the legislative level that are not possible right now. And every time I see couples walking down the street with their own children, with their own partners — it’s another reminder that for me this is an impossible reality right now. And then the new civil code is adopted, civil partnerships are ignored completely — and you have no idea whether it will ever happen at all. And that creates enormous demoralization.

Because I love Ukraine very much, I really want to stay here. I adore it with every fiber of my soul, I want to grow here, to develop this country for the good of my future self. But the further we go, the less I feel that I am valued here at all, that I will make any difference at all. Because deep down I know that every person makes a difference in this world, that every person makes their contribution — and the state simply makes me doubt that every single time. I just hate it. I have a certain mental foundation that I built for myself and really don’t want to disturb, but unfortunately my dreams are not achievable. And it’s a daily reminder — there is no single moment, it just glows there in the background all the time.

When we go down to the shelter

Especially during the war, when Zhenia and I go down to the shelter with our cat. I understand that if, say, we don’t make it to the shelter in time and one of us is killed by a missile, by a Shahed — well, I’m lucky to have a family that accepts me. And, say, with the funerals, with all those painful things that happen when a person dies because of the war, I would have a chance to be there, to have some say. But it isn’t like that in every family, it isn’t like that for everyone. I know plenty of cases where people simply hide their whole lives. And not being able to divide property, to attend the funeral of the person you love — that hurts.

Marriage isn’t about ticking a box

I’m afraid when it comes to children — that’s probably the most painful thought. That if I decide I want children, Yulia and I won’t be able to have them safely. In fact, we have no ground to stand on. Any couple comes to the state and says, “We want to register our family” — and they are already a family simply by the fact of registering a marriage. But when for now there are just the two of us, we can work around things — we can, as people keep advising us, go to a notary. And traipse around to notaries ourselves. Yes, we can sort out those paperwork things, but…

Which also don’t last — they have to be constantly renewed, checked. There are a great many nuances there, our legislation isn’t perfect either, a lot of gray zones, unclear questions. And we are definitely not the people who will be treated with understanding if problems come up with the documents — as very often happens. Even when everything is perfect, things usually come up that have to be settled in court or with lawyers. And we might get unlucky with the notaries, with the lawyers — and then it’s running around constantly, spending your own time, spending your own money. And if, say, I give birth to a child, we’ll have this whole pile of documents, but there will be problems with them, and, say, the child will need something at that exact moment. It’s impossible to foresee all of it, and it’s a huge number of complications. It is not the same as marriage.

And it makes me very angry when people say that marriage is a relic of the past. That we don’t need documents to confirm our love. It is not a document to confirm your love — it is, literally, the advantages you have under the law between two people. It is a document that carries force, a document that matters. And the fact that a lot of straight people don’t understand this themselves and do it just to tick a box — that doesn’t interest me. What interests me is precisely the state and legislative side. And I need it, and I hope we will get there.

The safety of our children

When it comes to our rights and in the context of children — it is very important for us to have a foundation precisely so that we can guarantee, first and foremost, the safety of the child. If one of the partners dies and she was the child’s mother, the second partner will be nobody to that child. Accordingly, the child is taken to an orphanage or taken by relatives. The second mother — she has no rights at all. And accordingly, if the other partner dies, her property also goes to some relatives, and not to her wife and child. All of this is very dangerous.

And whether the state likes it or not, we have families anyway, we have children anyway. And the state’s task is to guarantee our safety and our legal protections. We don’t just expect this from you — we demand it. We have every right to it, and we have the right to safety for our children, the ones we already have and the ones to come.

And again, in our case we were lucky, because our families accept us and love us. My mom asked me herself, when I came out to her: “So are you and Zhenia planning any children?” — “Mom, we’ve got a bit of a problem with the state here, so no, not for now.” Unfortunately. But, say, those families the child could go to if one of the women dies — that family could be homophobic. Say the child is little and goes to the part of the family that is homophobic; she might never even know that she had two mothers. And that she had a family that loved her very much, and that because of the war one of them was killed. And that could simply remain a secret for all eternity.

It’s a hypocritical circus

Injustice, disappointment. I kept hearing on the news that now is not the time, that we are under martial law. Before the war it was that our society is not ready for this sort of thing. Any attempt to introduce some LGBTQI+ provision into, say, the labor code… We had an amendment that simply banned discrimination. That is, all we got was an amendment saying that I, for instance, cannot be fired for being a lesbian or for having a girlfriend. But the very fact of even passing that raised the question: “How can this be? We are for the traditional family.” And that question had nothing to do with family at all. Meaning that every single time, in order to get our rights, we have to fight for them with incredible effort.

And when I saw, for example, last summer, how very easy it is to pass some dubious bill about NABU and SAPO — and it was just some random person who introduced that amendment in the middle of the session, and it could calmly be voted through and even signed within a matter of minutes — I just looked at that and understood that this whole thing is nothing but a hypocritical circus. You can do this here and now and guarantee the safety and the rights of a pile of people who are citizens of this country, who pay taxes, who are law-abiding, who serve in the military and do a whole lot of other things. And there is absolutely no threat to the traditional family — their rights are not being violated, they are not being denied, nobody is forbidding you anything. We are simply standing equal with you in rights. I don’t understand what the problem is with accepting that. So my feeling is disappointment, anger, a sense of injustice, of deep injustice. Thank you.